We've been happily drowning in tomatoes, eating our fill, and making tons of sauce. Granted, those tomatoes aren't from our garden, but still.

You see, we're perfectly happy with how things have gone in our garden this summer.

We still have luscious tomato plants, and each time we step out the door, we harvest a handful of small, ripe tomatoes. We may even harvest a few more big tomatoes before the summer ends. And there are hot peppers. And tons of herbs -- our parsley, especially, is abundant. Basil is doing well, but not quite as well as in years past. We have a little cilantro growing, too. One thing we dread about the coming change in seasons: having to buy herbs at the supermarket again. But it's too soon for that kind of fretting.

Peppers, coming in full force

This next story isn't really about our garden, but it's about the backyard, and we thought you might find it funny.

We spent Saturday morning elbow-deep in our compost tumbler (glamorous!). You see, our tumbler, which we've had now for three years, broke a few weeks ago and we couldn't use it anymore.

Anyhow, we contacted the company who makes the composter, they asked us to send them photos of the problem, and then they wrote back to say that even though our composter was no longer under warranty, they wanted to send us a new one because they didn't like what they saw in the photos. Amazing customer service, Sun-Mar.

In the meantime, we were surprised by how much we missed composting -- throwing away all those vegetable scraps and egg shells suddenly seemed so...wasteful? But then the composter arrived this week. The bad part: Our old one was filled with compost that was breaking down. So we dug in, literally, and transferred the contents of the old to the new.

Clay reached into the tumbler, and felt something unusual. It was difficult to see without just pulling the thing out, so he did.

And what did he find?

A composted knife -- needless to say, not compostable.

A 3 1/2-inch paring knife, just like this one. Bittens, that knife went missing many moons ago. It was one of our favorite knives, so we dug and rooted and dug some more through our cabinets, our drawers, the containers that hold all our kitchen tools. We looked for weeks and couldn't find it.

Little did we know we had composted it. Needless to say, it had not broken down, and the only sign of distress is a small bit of rust on the handle. It's now been thoroughly cleaned and is back in its rightful home in the knife block.

We finally pulled all the carrots two weeks ago. Now we have a crisper full of them, and plan to make soup to freeze before we go away for Labor Day. The carrots were fun to grow. Sadly, they're not quite as sweet as we had hoped, but they were good. Next year, if we grow carrots, we may try different colors and varieties, just for kicks. And we'll definitely plant them in less abundance.

Bless this watermelon plant's heart for trying

Against all reason, we planted a watermelon plant a few weeks ago. There's no way we'll see a watermelon before the first frost, but hey, you never know.

Lettuce on its way

But we also planted fall lettuces -- arugula, romaine and red leaf. We hope to start having some lettuce within the month.

This is also the time that we need to make a decision about more hardy fall and winter plants. Will we plant them, or just let the garden go for the year? If we get the gumption, we'll find some plants and try our hand at cauliflower or something similar. But that's a decision for after Labor Day.